Payment for ecosystem services as a measure for tropical dry forest conservation in Colombia

Final work presented in Economics and Enviroment course

Juan Sebastián Mendoza Páez

Forest engineering student

Tropical dry forest

It is an ecosystem characterized by:

Strong rain stationality.
Among 4 to 6 months per year of drought.
Restricted to lowlands from Mexico to Bolivia and Brazil in neotropic.
Physiological and morphological adaptations of plants and animals.

From ~9 million of hectares of original tropical dry forest extension, today only remain around of 8%. The livestock grazing and agriculture expansion are the main drivers of deforestation.

(Instituto de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt, 2014)

Payment for ecosystem services (PES)

The ecosystem services are the ecological characteristics, functions, or processes that directly or indirectly contribute to human wellbeing (Costanza et al., 2017).

Objective

Determine the Colombian towns with potential to implement a PES scheme. The town potential was established through the opportunity cost¹ of the main farming activities in regions where the tropical dry forest is present.

Methodology

Results

Tropical dry forest by Colombian regions

Opportunity cost in Colombian tropical dry forests

Conclusions

This work is a primer approach to the areas where strategies can be focused to preserve tropical dry forest in Colombia.

Thanks

References

Costanza, R., De Groot, R., Braat, L., Kubiszewski, I., Fioramonti, L., Sutton, P., Farber, S., & Grasso, M. (2017). Twenty years of ecosystem services: How far have we come and how far do we still need to go? Ecosystem Services, 28, 1–16.

Instituto de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt. (2014). El Bosque Seco Tropical en Colombia (C. Pizano & H. García, Eds.).